Tech Review: The Power of the "Like"

based on the article, "To Spread Your Brand On Facebook, Don't Target Your Fans--Target Their Friends" 

A new study has been released by start up company Social Essentials, a team project powered by Facebook and comScore, that says bands shouldn’t focus on their Facebook fans, but rather their Facebook fan’s friends. Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, and Microsoft Bing have all used the service to power their brand’s popularity on Facebook and measure their social standings. After comScore’s extensive study using volunteers to track their Facebook usage and news feeds they found a very shocking statistic: 16% of companies messages are actually being received by fans who “like” their page.

Facebook’s news feed is formatted to only display the most popular posts within a network therefore, if a fan’s friends has not “liked” a particular page then it’s updates will not appear in the fan’s news feed. This is why it is crucial to encourage the clicking of the “like” button and market to friends of fans. For example, Starbucks currently has 23 million fans on Facebook making for 670 million friends of fans that have untapped marketing potential. Tapping into these markets is easier than one might think because the gateway to fan-land is sitting right in front of us: the current fans.

Rewarding top users and encouraging them to spread the name of your company via their personal Facebook page is a perfect way to boost one’s brand without the message relaying directly from your company (no one wants that corporate ramble to intrude their news feed anyway). It’s taking the “refer-a-friend” card to a whole new sphere…an online sphere. The goal is to create posts which, promote interactions that expand beyond the company page and into fan’s personal networks. A company can easily focus too much on pleasing the market they’ve already conquered in hopes of building customer loyalty however, ignoring the bigger picture can hinder a their ability to gain opportunity for growth in the future.

Taking this concept and applying it to music seems very sensible. But where to begin? Personally, I think a great way to get the ball rolling would be to seek out a university that has always shown your artists great support and is home to a number of fans. Contact the most devoted fans from that campus and give them an incentive to encourage page “likes” or to create posts that relate back to the artist. The beauty of college networks is that if someone “likes” a page it shows up in their collegiate network AND their hometown network. BONUS.

I’ve noticed in my fan chatter research that often times Brett Dennen fans convert their non-fan friends to his music and seriously enjoy gloating about it. This “refer-a-friend” method might work great for artists like Brett who already have fans that are willing to share his music for absolutely nothing in return. In a previous fan chatter report, I suggested a campaign called, “Friends make friends listen to Brett Dennen,” this seems more appropriate now that I've read this article. Overall, I think this a really simple marketing tactice that can be easily implemented by administrators but create BIG time results.




KGC